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Protoscience:Community Portal
Welcome protoscientists, and also the protocurious! Please use this community portal to ask for help, ask questions or to make project announcements. Newest items are at the end. =Add your questions, comments, announcements= protoscience and pseudoscience *What is the difference between protoscience and pseudoscience? :-pseudoscience makes use of technical words such as "vibration" or "energy" without clearly defining what they mean. :-accepting the tenets of a pseudoscience may contradict a well established part of science without providing much evidence. :-pseudoscience articles probably lack references that lead to objective evidence. :-pseudoscience evidence is often anecdotal, subjective, and not reproducible. :-pseudoscience proponents may claim to be unfairly criticized when challenged to produce objective evidence to support their views. :-pseudoscience proponents may make irrelevant points and use illogical arguments ("there are more things under heaven … than are dreamed of in your philosophy …") Protoscience wikia Current events *What is the status of efforts to grow the protoscience wikia? :See the list of on-going community events and activities at Current events. Protoscience Blog Blog with RSS feeds of recent changes and new pages for the Protoscience wikia. Also, RSS feeds specific for various protosciences. I am also adding feeds for other wikia that I (JWSchmidt) am interested in. Try (4/27/05) to get the blogs listed on this search engine. Blog mirror | Blog help Webrings come to the Protoscience wikia *Browse webrings linked to Protoscience wikia. *Do you have a suggestion for an additional WebRing to add? External Links *Central WikiCity Community Portal sometimes has news for all wikia Is http://bloglines.com/blog/JWSchmidt relevant enough to link? Paragonian Foundation Project *Wholeness is the union of all opposites Category:MainCategory:Protoscience theory of everything I have a list of many things that claim to be a "theory of everything", describing the physics underlying everything we can see. Should I just dump the entire list in an article theory of everything? Or make individual articles for each one (I see someone already created Brane cosmology), and tag each one with some sort of "Category:theory of everything" ? --DavidCary 15:03, 23 May 2006 (UTC) *Do what feels right. --JWSchmidt 14:57, 25 May 2006 (UTC) Mechanical mathematician This is a simple device for making large parabolic dishes. It consists of a central post with a cross piece coming off at right angles. On the cross piece there is a slider bar that is parallel to the central post. The slider bar slides up and down parallel to the central post and also slides back and forth along the cross piece. A string is attached from anywhere on the central post (the focus of the parabola) and passes throught the bottom of the slider bar and is attached at the other end on the place where the slider bar is attached to the cross piece. Keep the string taut and move the slider bar to trace a parabolic curve. Do a different parabola simply by changing the length of string or by moving the focus up or down the central post. This is an incredibly versatile device. With it, you can make a parabolic dish out of cob, hardiplank, concrete, cardboard or other material. You can also make a freshnel parabolic dish by tracing out a part of the dish, lengthening the string and then tracing the next concentric ring, lengthing it again to make another and so forth! Cover with kitchen foil (generally cheap and over 85% reflective and you have an inexpensive solar parabolic cooker. All sorts of designs are possible. The flexibility is incredible! I have used it to make a 1 sq meter solar reflector from cob covered with aluminium foil and a solar cooker with a cardboard parabolic dish. You can learn more with an internet search. I thought it up in august 2007 and I am currently trying to make people aware of it. pulser pump Hi, I have made a type of pump that I call the pulser pump. I made one 18 years ago on my brothers farm and it still works. It is powered by a half meter head of waterin a stream that runs at 250 to 300 litres per minute. TINY! The pump is used to pump water to cattle and sheep that are housed in sheds. I have it on the web and the only problem is believability. I havnt yet got anyone to make on and upload pics of it. (There might be some of theses pumps in india and in the philipines) but I just need someone to confirm what I have done for 18 years. Thank you Brian White. (The pump is easily available on any search engine) :Do you have a "how to" file for how to make one? --JWSchmidt 04:27, 11 September 2006 (UTC) I have several "how to" pages and if anyone wants help or suggestions for building one, they can email me. (Have ball park figures for your water power site first). homeopathy Wikibooks: Homeopathy http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Homeopathy is on the verge of being deleted. Would it be a good idea to move/copy it here, somewhere connected to Medical controversies ? --DavidCary 15:35, 10 March 2007 (UTC) :I think it is worth a try. "a word on science. It is not advanced enough yet to explain how homeopathy works" <-- This wiki is trying to be about emerging areas of science. I have previously worked with medical students who are trying to bring homeopathy into the age of evidence-based medicine where results must come from exact protocols so that they can be tested by independent researchers. Reproducible results always trump theory. Homeopathy.--JWSchmidt 16:39, 10 March 2007 (UTC) informational cascade Dear people interested in protoscience, What do you think about this "informational cascade" idea? I hope this explains one reason why protosciences should be given a little space to grow, rather than ruthlessly squashed. --DavidCary 23:02, 23 October 2007 (UTC) : "Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus" by JOHN TIERNEY 2007 : "... Gary Taubes ... book meticulously debunking diet myths, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros." : "If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he’s liable to go along with the first person’s guess. ... Thus begins an “informational cascade” as one person after another assumes that the rest can’t all be wrong." : "Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better, according to the economists Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer and Ivo Welch. If, say, 60 percent of a group’s members have been given information pointing them to the right answer (while the rest have information pointing to the wrong answer), there is still about a one-in-three chance that the group will cascade to a mistaken consensus." *The history of science is full of examples were elements of conventional wisdom were widely adopted, almost never questioned, and then eventually shown to be wrong or incomplete or misleading in some way. We need all the help we can get when it comes to "thinking outside the box". Even if a protoscientific idea turns out to be wrong, it might be useful to explore it just because it will allow us to look at old ideas in new ways. --JWSchmidt 01:57, 24 October 2007 (UTC)